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Robert Fisk: “If anyone needed proof of the government’s state of indecision, they had only to look at yesterday’s Tehran newspapers. Suddenly, the mass demonstrations were acknowledged in full. A whole front page of photographs showed Wednesday afternoon’s Mousavi rally. Ahmadinejad had said at the weekend that his opponents were mere “layers of dust” – an unwise as well as a childish remark – but across one photograph, demonstrators can be seen carrying a banner which reads: “The layers of dust are making history.”"

VIA

Citizens become users and take-on a threatening aspect. Neighbourhoods segregate, becoming predatory locales. Manners specify and the public disintegrates into cults, not to say, cells.

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In a TV show like Madmen, set at the apex of golden era New York, the advertising man Don Draper is able to keep his different worlds and roles in rotation: “It’s a carousel,” he exclaims in one episode, branding a circle-slide, having previously offered to abandon his family and disappear with his mistress. The line echoes Koolhaas’ idea that Manhattanism was born in Coney Island; in the development of a technology of fun: the city is a theme park.

The classical Greek agora depended on slavery. For his part Negri employs, symptomatically, the term “utopian” interchangeably with the term “imperial”: the loss of the centre is an escape from imperialist domination.

The rise of interdisciplinary cultural studies is one symptom of this shift, while the art-world proliferation of roles (writer, editor, artist, curator, etc) is another. This logic remains so far mostly confined to the so-called creative class; the class which, linked to gentrification and the figure of the hipster, has come in for some of the strongest criticisms from the Left, which identifies the new class with an older one, and sees capitalistic processes at work in the new lifestyles.

The architecture charged with inscribing bodies is changing form. In his recent book Hatch the architecture journalist, critic, curator and teacher Kieran Long, the current editor of the Architects’ Journal, numbers figures like Eyal Weizman among the “new architectural generation.” Weizman designed his own house, but he remains more famous for his theoretical and mapping work, and his book Hollow Land, a text that employed the concept of architecture as an expansive metaphor for sociopolitical structures. This is the right track.

In his Radical Philosophy essay, Negri nominates Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas’s “retrospective manifesto for Manhattan” as one of the two key texts (the other is Koolhaas’s essay “Bigness”) for thinking about contemporary urbanism. The value of the book lies perhaps chiefly in its value as a source of comparison and contrast. Emphasizing the concept of program, Koolhaas writes of the Manhattan Grid as allowing different programs to be layered on top of each other.

]]> http://stereogram.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/2039/feed/ 0 stereogram22 http://stereogram.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/2038/ http://stereogram.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/2038/#comments Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:28:47 +0000 stereogram22 http://stereogram.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/2038/ ]]> The dead of night,

Drunk with life,

From the air,

Like a fly,

Snatched in sleep,

By a fist.

“As the Enlightenment and ‘modernity’ were increasingly called into question,” writes Peter Wollen, “a process accelerated by post-1968 disenchantment, French intellectuals turned away from ‘knowledge-based’ approaches to the humanities and towards the more speculative domains, urging a decentralized vision of ‘dissemination’, ‘rhizomes’ and ‘molecular’ microstructures. Godard also abandoned the centre, breaking his narrative down into a mosaic of micro-elements.”

A 2008 article for Le Monde entitled “Portrait de l’intellectuel en DJ

A recent list of the most exciting architects in Icon magazines included practices like Mexico’s ToroLab, a group that inhabits the space between art and architecture and which has been involved in designing types of food.

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[YOUTUBE=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAW7HHM5IWE]

Debord: “It is in these conditions that a parodic end of the division of labor suddenly appears, with carnivalesque gaiety, all the more welcome because it coincides with the generalized disappearance of all true competence. A financier can be a singer, a lawyer a police spy, a baker can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be president, a chef can philosophize on the movements of baking as if they were landmarks in universal history. Each can join the spectacle, in order publicly to adopt, or sometimes secretly practice, an entirely different activity from whatever specialty first made their name.”

“True competence”

Debord, the sometimes theorist, games designer, film-maker and revolutionary leader.

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